David Hare's 'Stuff Happens': All the President's Men in 'On the Road to Baghdad'

CONTRARY to what the American politicians of David Hare's "Stuff Happens" might believe, bigger doesn't always mean more powerful. The Public Theater's invigorating new production of Mr. Hare's journalistic drama about the road to war in Iraq, first mounted with epic proportions at the National Theater in London in 2004, is here conducted on the modest scale of a town-hall meeting. It is as if a telescope, first set up to be looked through at the wrong end, were now righted, changing not composition but perspective.

The characters, who include the sitting American president and British prime minister and many of their cabinet members, feel closer to the audience -- not just physically but emotionally. Often, they seem less like destiny-shaping, arbitrary gods than like the ego-trippers in your office. If that means they are too close for comfort, then "Stuff Happens," which opened last night under the smart, sharp direction of Daniel Sullivan, is doing its job.

Shrinkage may be the best thing that could have happened to Mr. Hare's quasi-documentary play. When I saw it in London, on the immense stage of the Olivier auditorium at the National, directed by Nicholas Hytner, the play had the marmoreal quality of mythic events carved into a temple frieze. Its eye was Olympian, and its principal figures might have been summoned by a latter-day Homer, outsize and sometimes grotesque creatures acting out a mortal pattern of which we already knew the final shape.

Mr. Sullivan's production does away with this sweeping distance. In placing "Stuff Happens" in the comparatively small Newman Theater at the Public, and putting the performers in a corridor of stage that runs between the two seating areas, the effect is as if the audience too is participating in this re-creation of recent events.

The play now seems less an arrogant, animated history book with a fixed agenda than a fluid public speculation -- a collective work of imagination that attempts to grasp how and why an unnecessary and unwinnable war was allowed to happen. The first-rate cast members -- who notably include Jay O. Sanders as President Bush, Peter Francis James as Colin Powell and Gloria Reuben as Condoleezza Rice -- become the audience's investigative agents. There's a new Brechtian distance between player and part, though in the cases of Mr. James and Ms. Reuben, the performances are also steeped in warmly insightful empathy that lends the production a concrete (as opposed to abstract) humanity.

I don't have to summarize the plot for you, do I? "Stuff Happens" charts the staff meetings (at the White House and at No. 10 Downing Street), closed-door conferences, public addresses, and backdoor diplomacy and betrayals that led to the American-spearheaded invasion of Iraq. Some of the material (including its title, famously uttered by Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld about looting in newly liberated Baghdad) is taken directly from transcripts of press conferences, United Nations assemblies and television interviews.

Many of the more compelling scenes, however -- especially those involving private conversations between Bush and Tony Blair (Byron Jennings), the British prime minister -- are indeed speculative. And it feels appropriate to the newly ruminative tone of "Stuff Happens" that we are aware that what we are seeing is not necessarily exactly how it was.

One quick but relevant aside: In his program notes for the National Theater, Mr. Hare wrote, while admitting that not everything in the play was taken from the record: "What happened happened. Nothing in the narrative is knowingly untrue." In an interview in The New York Times last month, he was more forthright about the scenes behind closed doors: "It's pure guesswork."

This greater openness about his dramatic methods has the paradoxical effect of making me trust more the undocumented moments in "Stuff Happens." Mr. Sullivan appears to have encouraged his cast members, most of whom play multiple roles, to use their imaginations to draw characters taken from real life in deeper, more realistic detail, avoiding the editorial cartoon sneers and snarls of many of their London counterparts. (Jeffrey De Munn's Donald Rumsfeld, Zach Grenier's Dick Cheney and David Pittu's Paul Wolfowitz are all models of finely etched political portraiture.)

Well, in most cases. Bush, who as embodied by Alex Jennings was unquestionably the psychological linchpin of the National production, is less complex here. Mr. Jennings's Bush initially registered as a boyish pretender playing cowboy-president. But as the drama progressed, you sensed an unwavering conviction that seemed to spring from a belief in a president's divine right to rule. The audience's growing realization that this character was not the joke he first appeared to be might be said to parallel changing perceptions about the real Mr. Bush.

Square of jaw and mountainous of build, Mr. Sanders's Bush is, from the beginning, a monolithic presence, less an evolving character than a fixed historical force. The same could be said of Byron Jennings's Tony Blair, a part Mr. Hare has tweaked to put more emphasis on the prime minister's idealism and less on his political survival strategies. (In London, Nicholas Farrell seemed to glisten with the oil of self-preservation.)

This automatically shifts the play's center. If "Stuff Happens" were indeed the Shakespearean history play it aspires to be, its London production might have been called "George II"; the New York version is unmistakably "The Tragedy of Colin Powell."

As portrayed by Mr. James, in what is surely the performance of his career, Powell becomes the character everyone is most likely to identify with. Here is a smart careerist who winds up believing that his boss's agenda is neither ethical nor desirable. Most of us, at least those of us who like to imagine we still have some integrity, have found ourselves in comparable situations in the workplace. Now imagine that situation with the stakes raised to world-changing, life-annihilating heights.

From his first audience with the president through his increasingly tortured dealings with the United Nations Security Council (led by an Inspector Clouseau-accented Robert Sella as Dominique de Villepin), Mr. James's Powell progresses from apprehensive but hopeful good faith into fiery indignation and finally into numbed, appalled resignation. Mr. James seems to flame up and then freeze into moral paralysis as Powell perceives that he has been blindsided by his colleagues. He is Brutus in "Julius Caesar," an honorable man forced to run a race he no longer believes in.

Correspondingly, the central relationship in this production is not that of Bush and Blair but of Powell and Rice, who are, in different ways, good soldiers and usually the calmest, most objective minds in a room. Tellingly, Mr. Hare has restructured "Stuff Happens" so the first act now ends with a cryptic encounter between Powell and Rice. (The original version had Hans Blix being summoned from a hiking expedition to begin the inspection for weapons of mass destruction.)

Ms. Reuben is a worthy match for Mr. James, which is saying something. She exudes the preternatural cool and poise we associate with the real Ms. Rice, while registering barely perceptible tremors of ambivalence beneath the glacial facade. (Mr. Hare has tempered his original, less charitable portrait.)

As in London, varied points of view, including some supporting the invasion of Iraq, are given passionate and articulate voice. But it is the excellent Ms. Reuben and Mr. James who become our most immediate connection to the chain of events of "Stuff Happens." Surely some theatergoers will identify with Mr. James's aching suggestions of the enduring guilt of not speaking up in public dissent -- in any context -- when it still might have made all the difference.